The wearable market is expanding rapidly from watches to patches and other types of sensors; these devices can monitor a range of measures like inflammation levels and heart activity to help people manage their health from home. Now a study published in the journal Science describes a newcomer to the arena, a prototype smart mask that can monitor a range of medical conditions including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Breathe in, breathe out
“Monitoring a patient’s breath is something that is routinely done, for example, to assess asthma and other respiratory conditions. However, this has required the patient to visit a clinic for sample collection, followed by a waiting period for lab results,” says Caltech’s Wei Gao, professor of medical engineering, and the lead investigator of the new study. “Since COVID-19, people are wearing masks more. We can leverage this increased mask use for remote personalized monitoring to get real-time feedback about our own health in our home or office. For instance, we could use this information to assess how well a medical treatment may be working.”
This smart mask, called EBCare, can analyze the chemicals in one’s breath in real-time, for example, it could monitor asthma sufferers for levels of nitrite, a chemical that indicates airway inflammation.
Developing the smart mask
Gao has already developed a range of wearable biosensors that analyze human sweat to measure metabolites, nutrients, hormones, and protein levels. But this time the goal was to monitor the breath, which came with a new set of challenges.
To analyze the chemicals or molecules in somebody’s breath, first, it needs to be cooled and condensed into a liquid, which is done separately from the analysis by chilling moist breath samples on buckets of ice or bulky refrigerated coolers.
However, the prototype mask is self-cooling, and the breath is cooled by a system that integrates hydrogel evaporative cooling with radiative cooling to effectively chill the breath on face masks. Once converted to liquid, capillaries (bioinspired microfluidics) transport the liquid to sensors for analysis, and then the results are transmitted to a tablet, computer, or phone.
New paradigm
“The mask represents a new paradigm for respiratory and metabolic disease management and precise medicine because we can easily get breath specimens and analyze the chemical molecules in breath in real-time through daily masks,” says Wenzheng Heng, lead author of the study and a graduate student at Caltech. “The breath condensate contains soluble gases as well as nonvolatile substances in the form of aerosols or droplets, such as metabolic substances, inflammatory indicators, and pathogens.”
“We learned from plants how to transport the water,” says Gao. “Plants use capillary forces to draw water upward from the ground.”
“The smart mask can be prepared at a relatively low cost,” Gao adds. “It is designed to cost only about $1 in materials.”
Testing the prototype
The masks were tested in a set of human studies, monitoring the patients’ breath for nitrite, a biomarker for inflammation. The analysis revealed that the masks accurately detected the biomarker, indicating inflammation in the patient’s airways.
Another test demonstrated that the masks accurately detected blood alcohol levels in human subjects, suggesting the masks could be used for on-site drinking-and-driving checks or other forms of alcohol-consumption monitoring.
The smart masks also accurately detect ammonium levels increase in the saliva which breaks down into ammonia gas, closely reflecting urea levels in the blood, and could potentially assist with the monitoring and management of kidney disease.
Proof of concept
“These first studies are a proof of concept,” says Gao. “We want to expand this technology to incorporate different markers related to various health conditions. This is a foundation for creating a mask that functions as a versatile general health-monitoring platform.”
“The smart mask platform for EBC harvesting and analysis represents a major advance in the potential to monitor lung health in real-time,” says co-author Harry Rossiter, investigator at the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA and professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “That concept, that biosensors for a wide range of compounds may be added in the future, highlights the game-changing potential of the smart mask for health monitoring and diagnostics.”
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Image Credit: Caltech/Wei Gao and Wenzheng Heng
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